- Howard storm it was very important to them how to#
- Howard storm it was very important to them professional#
And if a lie will set you free, they will take the lie. There are people on all points of the political spectrum now who are questioning the importance of truth.
Howard storm it was very important to them how to#
You need to understand how the guy’s foot got on your neck, and how to use leverage to get the foot off your neck. How do I find a legislative formula that works to get rid of mass incarceration? Is there something in policy circles? Does truth in that environment matter? If someone’s foot is on my neck, my goal is to get the guy’s foot off my neck. I believe that the highest role of an academic in a movement is to use your intellect to solve problems, in this particular case to solve the problem of mass incarceration. Some people believe that the highest expression of intellectual life is to speak truth to power. There are various roles for a social scientist or a historian in a movement. How do you advance those goals while also correcting the activists’ mistakes about the historical record? Let’s say you’re an an academic who is committed to the goals of the activists. They don’t seem to have a critical capacity to say: We see what you’re doing, but we differ with you. The claim by prisoners is, from the very beginning, a weapon in the struggle to change their world.īut the academics, the people who are paid for their thinking and research, are going along with the movement. He had an epiphany when he read the 13th Amendment among a group of prisoners. When I started going back and searching, I learned about Lee Wood, the guy who was in prison in California and said he discovered this. A little hyperbole in an essay usually means nothing. She didn’t make that big a deal of it - it was a passing comment. Within the academy, I traced it back to Angela Davis. I had no idea where it had come from initially.
It was a powerful tool for consciousness-raising in that context.
Howard storm it was very important to them professional#
“In keeping with our era,” Scott writes, “bad history and worse social science have replaced truth as the intellectual underpinning for a great deal of thinking about social change.” I talked with Scott recently about propaganda, myth-making, student protests, and Facebook.Īs you explain, the theory that the 13th Amendment allowed for the functional re-enslavement of freed Blacks emerged not from professional scholars but from the incarcerated activist Lee Wood, in the 1960s. Scott, in an essay in Liberties, coins the term “thirteentherism” to describe what he says is a fundamental misconstrual of the historical record. The problem, according to the Howard University historian Daryl Michael Scott, is that it’s just not true. That thesis has fascinated amateur history buffs, motivated activists, and given rhetorical ammunition to politicians like Bernie Sanders, who explained in an essay for Medium that, “due to an extreme shortage of labor caused by the emancipation of slaves, former Confederate states exploited the legalization of penal labor by incarcerating newly freed Black people.”
The filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th made a powerful historical claim pithily encapsulated in its subtitle: “From slave to criminal in one amendment.” The argument goes like this: The 13th Amendment’s so-called exception clause, which outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted,” effectively converted race-based slavery into race-based incarceration.